Forums
New posts
Search forums
What's new
New posts
New media
New media comments
Latest activity
Classifieds
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Log in
Register
What's New?
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
New posts
Search forums
Menu
Log in
Register
Navigation
Install the app
Install
More Options
Advertise with us
Contact Us
Close Menu
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Forums
The Water Cooler
General Discussion
Question 4 PC Techies/Gamers
Search titles only
By:
Reply to Thread
This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Message
<blockquote data-quote="NightShade" data-source="post: 2752639" data-attributes="member: 29706"><p>I recently started dealing with a FreeNAS computer I am building and I want to toss a little info out there on some benchmarking.</p><p></p><p>I mine a particular crypto coin from time to time and as far as a CPU benchmark it works pretty well. My wife's i7 laptop runs the coin around 440 Khash/s the same coin on my fx8350 runs around 500 Khash/s a pair of Xeon 5640's @2.6Ghz was able to hash at around 650 Khash/s The Xeon's cost me 55 dollars for both used, the fx 8350 costs three times that new. </p><p></p><p>The reason why I am throwing this info out there is that if I were to build a computer today I would pick up a workstation board that supports x16 PCIe cards with a pair of Xeon's of at least 5640 or higher (<a href="http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-X5660-2-8-GHz-Six-Core-AT80614005127AA-Processor-SLBV6/201346374812?_trksid=p2047675.c100009.m1982&_trkparms=aid%3D777000%26algo%3DABA.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20131227121020%26meid%3Dc14e017ea47e4c0e80b10c83e2c4d312%26pid%3D100009%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26sd%3D131510854951" target="_blank">5660'</a>s go up from 4 core with hyperthreading to 6 core with hyperthreading and can be found on ebay around 80 each). The Xeon's I have with the board also supports 192GB of ram which is overkill for the most part but are TRI channel so even if they only support ddr3 1333 it is still very fast because it uses three channels rather than two at around 1600 and unless you are willing to buy fast memory with tight timing you will see better performance with the tri channel setup. You also have two cpu's with tri channel and they have an even faster interconnect that allows the transfer of information from one cpu's memory to the other at the bare minimum of say 4GB of ram populating just 3 of the slots for each cpu there will be 24GB of ram. With a pair of 5640's you get 8 cpu cores and hyperthreading and each cpu has 12MB of cache. Right now consumer cpu's are starting to step up to this level and you are going to pay nosebleed prices for it. By dropping to a little older tech you can get it at a reduced price. And if you play your cards right you can find one that has SATA as well as SAS. My server board is <a href="http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/QPI/5500/X8DT6-F.cfm" target="_blank">http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/QPI/5500/X8DT6-F.cfm</a> but if you were looking for a workstation board I would go with something like <a href="http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/qpi/5500/x8da3.cfm" target="_blank">http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/qpi/5500/x8da3.cfm</a> And most games that are made today support at least dual core systems and a lot work with up to four beyond that is just candy for other apps to use.</p><p></p><p>The downside to my idea is that there is NO overclocking and you have to have a PSU with TWO cpu 12v 8 pin power connectors while a regular motherboard will only require one. A application that is not setup for multiple cores will not see performance gains unless you have one core that is very fast. You will have to get a case that supports ExtendedATX, the board is over 12 by 13 inches so basically massive. If you use off the shelf DDR3 ram that is non ecc and unregistered which is the majority of ram you will be limited to 48GB max. You will have to use a Professional or ultimate version of windows as the "home" version will not be able to use both cpu's Linux however has no such limitation. Finally crossfire or SLI will be a crapshoot. A lot of times the workstation boards are designed to have SLI due to their use with CAD CAM and other graphics intensive applications but they do not guarantee support from what I have read though crossfire does work on the board I linked above. </p><p></p><p>Multiple GPU's are great for some stuff but some games do not work perfectly with it. I generally try and buy a card that is about the max I can afford today and in six months to a year get one that is identical at a lower price and run dual. You will find though that any games ran in windowed mode will not use both cards. It must be full screen so if you run WoW or Starcraft in windowed mode so you can have other information open on a second game you are just better off spending more money on the graphics card than you would if you planned to add a second card.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Do what you want this is MY theory on stuff and the way I do things when I game is I end up having the game running with software for the mouse and keyboard as well as a browser with music playing and often times a voice chat app. They all take CPU cycles and will work together better with more than 4 cores which is the reason why I upgraded from a Phenom II x4 965 to the fx 8350. Plus having access to a SAS controller opens up a CRAPLOAD of storage. My FreeNAS box will have 7 HDD's to start with and I can add 7 more later on. I will have 12TB of storage using 3tb drives and can have any 3 drives fail and not lose a thing stored on the array. The SAS controller can have a chip picked up if you are going to use windows that will give the controller raid 5 support or you can use windows software raid, still 14 total drive connections is hard to pass up.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="NightShade, post: 2752639, member: 29706"] I recently started dealing with a FreeNAS computer I am building and I want to toss a little info out there on some benchmarking. I mine a particular crypto coin from time to time and as far as a CPU benchmark it works pretty well. My wife's i7 laptop runs the coin around 440 Khash/s the same coin on my fx8350 runs around 500 Khash/s a pair of Xeon 5640's @2.6Ghz was able to hash at around 650 Khash/s The Xeon's cost me 55 dollars for both used, the fx 8350 costs three times that new. The reason why I am throwing this info out there is that if I were to build a computer today I would pick up a workstation board that supports x16 PCIe cards with a pair of Xeon's of at least 5640 or higher ([URL="http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-X5660-2-8-GHz-Six-Core-AT80614005127AA-Processor-SLBV6/201346374812?_trksid=p2047675.c100009.m1982&_trkparms=aid%3D777000%26algo%3DABA.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20131227121020%26meid%3Dc14e017ea47e4c0e80b10c83e2c4d312%26pid%3D100009%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26sd%3D131510854951"]5660'[/URL]s go up from 4 core with hyperthreading to 6 core with hyperthreading and can be found on ebay around 80 each). The Xeon's I have with the board also supports 192GB of ram which is overkill for the most part but are TRI channel so even if they only support ddr3 1333 it is still very fast because it uses three channels rather than two at around 1600 and unless you are willing to buy fast memory with tight timing you will see better performance with the tri channel setup. You also have two cpu's with tri channel and they have an even faster interconnect that allows the transfer of information from one cpu's memory to the other at the bare minimum of say 4GB of ram populating just 3 of the slots for each cpu there will be 24GB of ram. With a pair of 5640's you get 8 cpu cores and hyperthreading and each cpu has 12MB of cache. Right now consumer cpu's are starting to step up to this level and you are going to pay nosebleed prices for it. By dropping to a little older tech you can get it at a reduced price. And if you play your cards right you can find one that has SATA as well as SAS. My server board is [URL]http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/QPI/5500/X8DT6-F.cfm[/URL] but if you were looking for a workstation board I would go with something like [URL]http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/qpi/5500/x8da3.cfm[/URL] And most games that are made today support at least dual core systems and a lot work with up to four beyond that is just candy for other apps to use. The downside to my idea is that there is NO overclocking and you have to have a PSU with TWO cpu 12v 8 pin power connectors while a regular motherboard will only require one. A application that is not setup for multiple cores will not see performance gains unless you have one core that is very fast. You will have to get a case that supports ExtendedATX, the board is over 12 by 13 inches so basically massive. If you use off the shelf DDR3 ram that is non ecc and unregistered which is the majority of ram you will be limited to 48GB max. You will have to use a Professional or ultimate version of windows as the "home" version will not be able to use both cpu's Linux however has no such limitation. Finally crossfire or SLI will be a crapshoot. A lot of times the workstation boards are designed to have SLI due to their use with CAD CAM and other graphics intensive applications but they do not guarantee support from what I have read though crossfire does work on the board I linked above. Multiple GPU's are great for some stuff but some games do not work perfectly with it. I generally try and buy a card that is about the max I can afford today and in six months to a year get one that is identical at a lower price and run dual. You will find though that any games ran in windowed mode will not use both cards. It must be full screen so if you run WoW or Starcraft in windowed mode so you can have other information open on a second game you are just better off spending more money on the graphics card than you would if you planned to add a second card. Do what you want this is MY theory on stuff and the way I do things when I game is I end up having the game running with software for the mouse and keyboard as well as a browser with music playing and often times a voice chat app. They all take CPU cycles and will work together better with more than 4 cores which is the reason why I upgraded from a Phenom II x4 965 to the fx 8350. Plus having access to a SAS controller opens up a CRAPLOAD of storage. My FreeNAS box will have 7 HDD's to start with and I can add 7 more later on. I will have 12TB of storage using 3tb drives and can have any 3 drives fail and not lose a thing stored on the array. The SAS controller can have a chip picked up if you are going to use windows that will give the controller raid 5 support or you can use windows software raid, still 14 total drive connections is hard to pass up. [/QUOTE]
Insert Quotes…
Verification
Post Reply
Forums
The Water Cooler
General Discussion
Question 4 PC Techies/Gamers
Search titles only
By:
Top
Bottom